Renovation work is set to begin on the Rocky Mountain Rangers home base in Prince George. The construction contract was signed last week - coincidentally, it was the week containing Army Reserve Recognition Day in Canada.
That same recognition day had other connections to the upstart army unit in Prince George. It was the one-year anniversary of Sgt. Travis Trussler's arrival in Prince George. He is one of the RM Rangers' senior personnel members. For years he has been a member of the regular Canadian Forces, with past deployments to every coast in Canada, the farthest northern community at Canadian Forces Base Alert, the former Yugoslavia, and more.
He and his wife were living in Whitehorse doing civilian jobs when career opportunities came up for both of them in the Prince George area - he is an engineering project manager (his military expertise is engineering also), she is a registered nurse - so they packed their bags.
Trussler was already aware of the RM Rangers starting up a B Company in Prince George (the unit's A Company is headquartered in Kamloops).
"We had heard rumours they were trying to stand something up here. I figured they would need help and they really accepted me when I arrived," Trussler said. "It's the first new reserve unit to start up in I don't know how long, and Prince George was the largest community in Canada to be without one."
He has relished the challenges of starting a unit up from scratch, and being part of a small team of senior soldiers training up a company of rookie reservists, but it has been difficult at times. It would have been impossible to be so committed to Capt. Seth Hunter's team, he said, were it not for the other person he salutes every day.
His boss at Ruskin Construction, Jim Basha, said the workplace has certainly had to be extra accommodating for Trussler's extracurricular activities, but instead of that being a problem it is paying off corporately.
"I'm not trying to toot his horn, but if we could have 10 Travises...," Basha said. "We are actually hoping to do more recruiting from the army reserves, if the candidates are anything like Travis. They are so supportive of our country and our community that we at Ruskin wanted to support that. Look at all the people they've given a part-time job too, and look at all the training and skills they are building in those young men and women. The disciple, the work ethic, the leaderships skills..."
It was what Basha was expecting. He was a reservist himself, as a teenager back in his hometown of Cornerbrook, Newfoundland. Ruskin was working on some major construction projects in the Yukon that Trussler was a part of, so the two sides started talking and the rest is now unfolding in Prince George.
The officer in charge of B-Company, Hunter, said Ruskin was one of those corporate supporters who enable the reserves to succeed by granting time off, adjusting schedules, arranging duty-sharing, and being open to some tired employees once in awhile.
There are many of them now - part-time Prince George soldiers making money with the army while going to school, holding down regular jobs, or on the side.
"We currently have 56 soldiers, including full-time staff and attach-posted soldiers like Sgt. Trussler [those officially based with a full-time unit but allowed to operate with the reserves close to home]," said Hunter. "The youngest is 17, we registered him on his 17th birthday because that is the minimum age limit. Our oldest member is in his late 40s. We have mostly males but some females and more are encouraged and welcome to join."
The part-timers generally train one night per week plus some weekends and summer training deployments to places like Canadian Forces Base Wainwright. Hunter said the current complement includes two firefighters, three corrections officers, three ambulance paramedics, a teacher, a WorkSafeBC staffer, two minors, nine students from CNC and UNBC, someone from a sandwich shop, someone from a sports store, and many others.
According to the Ministry of National Defense, Canada's army has almost 25,000 reservists. In a little over a decade, more than 4,000 of them have been deployed overseas while in the past five years, 3,000 reservists have deployed inside Canada for domestic concerns.
